‘Sure,’ Uncle Jarv said. His face was red and his hair was thin. He had never been a good-looking man but that had never stopped women from liking him. We kept crossing the same creek over and over again.

We crossed it at least a dozen times, and it was always a surprise to see the creek again because it was kind of pleasant, the water low with long months of heat, going through country that had been partially logged off.

‘Are there any wolves?’

‘A few. We’re getting close to town now,’ Uncle Jarv said. We saw a farm house. Nobody lived there. It was abandoned like a musical instrument.

There was a good pile of wood beside the house. Do ghosts burn wood? I guess it’s up to them, but the wood was the colour of years.

‘How about wildcats? There’s a bounty on them, isn’t there?’

We passed by a sawmill. There was a little log pond dammed up behind the creek. Two guys were standing on the logs. One of them had a lunch bucket in his hand.

‘A few dollars,’ Uncle Jarv said.

We were now coming into the town. It was a small place. The houses and stores were rinky-tinky, and looked as if a lot of weather had been upon them.

‘How about bears?’ I said, just as we went around a bend in the road, and right in front of us was a pickup truck and there were two guys standing beside the truck, taking bears out of it.

‘The country’s filled with bears,’ Uncle Jarv said. ‘There are a couple of them right over there.’

And sure enough… as if it were a plan, the guys were lifting the bears out, handling the bears as if they were huge pumpkins covered with long black hair. We stopped the car by the bears and got out.

There were people standing around looking at the bears. They were all old friends of Uncle Jarv’s. They all said hello to Uncle Jarv, and where you been?

I had never heard so many people saying hello at once. Uncle Jarv had left the town many years before. ‘Hello, Jarv, hello.’ I expected the bears to say hello.

‘Hello, Jarv, you old bad penny. What’s that you’re wearing around there for a belt? One of them Goodyears?’

‘Ho-ho, let’s take a look at the bears.’

They were both cubs, weighing about fifty or sixty pounds. They had been shot up on Old Man Summers’ Creek. The mother had gotten away. After the cubs were dead, she ran into a thicket, and hid in close with the ticks.

Old Man Summers’ Creek! That’s where we were going hunting. Up Old Man Summers’ Creek! I’d never been there before. Bears!